Old Haifa Stuff

I think I'd had a theme to write about before I posted the letter, and so I never really got a chance to talk about "getting lost". It was going to include a few lines about how a lifelong Haifan takes a bat-sherut (בת שרות) and an American volunteer on a six hour, 228 kilometer call to Tel Aviv and Kir'on and then got mixed up in and ate cheap falafel in Bnei Brak. It was going to include a piece on the alleyways in the lower section of Haifa, not far from where I live, and how an ambulance driver will always turn the wrong direction (i.e.: into decreasing instead of increasing numbers) when given the opportunity and then will have to drive through streets wide enough for an ambulance and a pushcart until he gets back to a main street--that inevitably goes one way the wrong way.

As it is, though, it's been since January 22 that I've been half-considering that sort of post, and maybe a single-paragraph outline (like, for example, the partially paraliptic paragraph above) will do the trick. Let's consider that one settled.

On the 8th I worked a double shift, the morning as regular and then on the ICU in the afternoon (because they asked who wanted to stay and we don't usually get to work afternoon shifts or on the ICU). One call was a "ragil" call but we took it because all the regular (RaGiL...ReGuLar) ambulances were taken. One was a hypoglucemic who stopped being groggy and unintelligible within 30 seconds of a glucose IV. The third was a drunk man lying outside the Maccabi Haifa stadium bleeding from the head, but we didn't deal with him at all because a second ambulance came at almost the same time.

We left that guy and rushed to a car accident in the northbound lanes of HaHagana, the main road into Haifa from the south, where, as the ICU driver said, "Zeh iks," which it took me about fifteen seconds to understand. "This is an X," is pretty self-explanatory. The only question was how the mid-20s daughter-driver managed to kill her mother riding in the passenger seat. I was first told to hold the flashlight so the paramedic could put the monitor electrodes on the mother's body but was then told to get in our ambulance with the daughter and not to leave there. So I didn't get to see how the fire engine squad cut her out of her position, which was head twisted sideways at a gory angle, a cut all the way across the forehead, and certain injuries to organs on the right side of her body from the impact.

I heard that what happened was that the daughter told my driver that she ran a red light southbound, tried a wide left turn into the cross-street, and got hit by the green-light car moving north at a normal highway speed. There's no question it's her fault, especially as she admitted the left turn through the red light.

This is the skid mark and also some of the debris left over from the accident a few days after it happened. They hadn't quite cleaned everything off the island, though the street was cleared before morning.

In a better case, though, I knew that if I was going to get only one CPR during my time here in MADA, it was going to be on my birthday. Naturally, though I don't know it will be the only one, I did get one. There's not so much to write about it other than that it was successful and neither Beth nor I did very much to make that happen. Our ambulance came first (again with Tal driving) but was followed immediately by one guy who heard over the radio and came with his equipment and also by a regular ICU and a "parademic supervisor" ambulance, so there were about eight of us in this little room with the woman. I'd helped lower her from the bed to the floor and to cut off her shirt, but that was about it. Still, though, she's alive today and I got the call on by birthday.

We went out that night, after not so much convincing and a warning from mom that if I took the 18 shots the Haifa people (well, just the problem ones) wanted me to take that she'd smack me. The manager/guard had no intention of carding me (I wrote about that last time) but I came up to him with my wallet in my hand having already given my camera to someone to snap a picture of the official 18 moment. But that wasn't the interesting part of the evening.

On the way down toward the downtown-ish part of Haifa, about a ten minute walk from the Absorption Center, we always pass the bottom floor of an abandoned building with windows covered by green tarps and with a few late-teen Arabs who are always smoking nargilah and making catcalls at groups walking by. It seems pretty creepy, though when we decided, five of us, to say hi to them, we found out they were quite nice guys who weren't just spending their nights drinking in an abandoned building but were working there guarding the construction site while the crews weren't working. We hung out with them for about 45 minutes, talking and them singing and me asking questions about Arabic and a few people joining in their nargilah...it was without a doubt the most random "Israeli experience" I'll have in Israel. 'Twas fun...